Time Out of Mind
by stringertheory
Summary: Can you miss what you can't remember? Sometimes the heart holds on long after the mind lets go.


**Spoilers/Timeline:** The end of Series 4, post "Journey's End"  
>Would be considered AU. Because Donna deserves much better than the ending she was given.<p>

It began slowly, the remembering.

Not _remembering_ so much - more like _trying_ to remember. Donna Noble _tried_ to remember very slowly.

The first instance was during the holidays. She came down with a mild case of the flu near Christmas and spent the better part of a fortnight curled up on the sofa, choking down dry crackers and water. During the worst, her mum stayed home to keep an eye on her.

Running a temperature and barely able to focus, Donna had a difficult time managing the glass of water that was gently pushed into her hand one late afternoon. The sun cut low through the closed blinds, pale winter sunlight throwing the room into odd patches of light and shadow. Donna sat upright on the couch, blinking bemusedly as she struggled to focus. The empty glass was pulled from her fingers and blessedly cool hands touched her forehead and smoothed her hair. She turned into the touch, but when the fingers brushed at her temples she jerked away instinctively, a flutter of fear rising in her chest. Feverish, bewildered, and unsettled, Donna slipped back into sleep even as some part of her weary mind registered her mother's light sigh of annoyance. When Donna woke that evening, fever gone, the only memory she could pull up of the incident was the feeling of a soft touch and terror.

She brushed it off as part of a fevered dream and forgot all about it until months later, when coincidences began to pile up. Until then, she fell into routine, bouncing from temp job to temp job, spending nights out with friends, going nowhere fast and not at all bothered by it. For a while, at least.

A man darted out in front of the car while she made her way to work one morning. She planned to yell at him about the benefits of a crosswalk and even had the window cracked, but something about the way his brown trench coat fluttered behind him made her pause. She had a funny feeling in her stomach, not quite like butterflies (not as _happy _as butterflies), and found herself scanning the sidewalks for another glimpse of the stranger. He was nowhere in sight and the blast of a horn urged her on with traffic.

That night, she dreamt of a vast darkness full of stars. A figure stood in front of her, but she couldn't look up at his face. All she could see were his shoes, his red high tops, so she focused on those as they spun slowly through the black.

She awoke with a whisper in the back of her mind, a whisper in a language she didn't understand but a voice that was vaguely familiar.

She mostly forgot the dream and the sense of incompleteness it gave her. Sometimes, though, that same feeling haunted her. Every moment began to carry the potential for a reaction she couldn't predict or control. The simplest actions, the most inconsequential thoughts, the least of words - they suddenly were sparks to a hidden kindling, ready to set her mind afire. News reports, gossip, random images in magazines - anything could do it.

Out shopping one day with her mother, Donna found herself pulled into a trinket shop. The two meandered around, fiddling with the various odds and ends and amusing themselves with the silly dustcatchers. Near the dimly lit rear of the store, they found a basket of small globes made of frosted glass. The placard attached to the basket proclaimed the objects to be _"Gypsy Crystal Balls (With Built-in Lights!)"_. As Donna watched, her mum plucked the display model out of the pile and flipped the small switch on its bottom. The ball emitted a warm glow that illuminated the dark and dusty shelves around them, highlighting the sharp angles of a totem pole propped in one corner. With a grin, her mother cupped the globe in her hands and hunched over it, cackling slightly as she waved a hand over the ball and asked if Donna wanted her fortune told.

Donna decidedly didn't. The thought made the back of her neck itch.

She giggled at the uncharacteristic silliness, but as she watched her mum cradle the bright orb between her hands, Donna began to feel uneasy and the laughter died on her lips. For a split second, her heart ached and the ghost of some sorrow-filled melody echoed in her mind. Suddenly, inexplicably, she was overwhelming sad and felt like weeping uncontrollably. Her mother took one look at her pale face and immediately led her back out of the store. Donna tried not to think about the strange combination of confusion and bitter knowledge she read in her mother's face.

Pieces were falling into place, but the pieces were blank and most of the puzzle was missing and she wasn't even sure if the pieces she had belonged to the same picture.

She felt detached, sort of adrift, so she decided to try a drastic change. Around her birthday, she suddenly quit her job and took an impromptu trip to Spain. Surprisingly, there wasn't a peep from her mother about the impracticality of the venture. Instead, when she opened her luggage to unpack at the hotel, she found a small box nestled on top of her clothes. Inside was a delicate, silver chain holding a miniature hourglass, a star, and a suitcase. Taped to the inside of the lid was a note that said: _Have fun._

She did, taking in the cities and the coast and everything in between, but she never felt completely happy. Donna returned home with a bag full of souvenirs and more pictures than necessary but not the feeling of excitement and fulfillment she'd hoped for. Slightly discouraged, she went back to temping and struggled to keep it together.

More than anything, she felt _emptied_.

The best she could explain it (and she _tried _to explain it, at least to herself) was that it was like catching a whiff of the perfume her grandmother wore, or hearing part of a tune she knew as a child - something familiar and forgotten that her heart was desperately telling her mind to remember. And yet it was so much more than that. In those moments, Donna Noble could swear that she once knew the universe from beginning to end.

Watching television one night, she got up to grab some snacks, leaving her mum and granddad in the den. A commercial came on as she reached the kitchen. Something - she couldn't have repeated it to save her life - fanned the embers in her mind. She came to standing with the refrigerator door wide open, staring blindly at the contents. Shaking her head to clear it, she closed the door and turned to find her grandfather watching her from the doorway. He was looking at her with an expression of such tender, painful sadness that she almost - _almost _- asked if he knew.

She no longer joined him for stargazing, or at least not often; she couldn't bear the way he stared at the skies. There was a new intensity to his gaze, almost as if he were searching for something in particular. His beloved telescope rarely saw use anymore as he scanned the heavens with his naked eyes, gazing skyward with less joy than his eyes had once carried and something much closer to raw hope. It made her uncomfortable, though that didn't stop her from sneaking out when he had his pinochle night and watching the stars in her turn.

She knew what was going on, even if she couldn't explain it. She thought about confronting her granddad, but couldn't stomach the thought. Either he knew and wasn't telling her (and she wouldn't believe he'd do so without her best interests in mind), or he didn't and she was reading into things. Instead, she confronted her mother, though it didn't get her anywhere. Her mum denied any knowledge of Donna having lost her memories and told her she was being ridiculous. Donna knew she was lying, but there was something in her mother's expression that told her she wouldn't get any answers, something that made her question if she even wanted them.

She didn't know whether to rage or cry.

Sometimes Donna was frightened by the overwhelming vastness her flashes hinted at, the sheer greatness of the knowledge they suggested. Other times she felt cheated. And sometimes, out of the blue, she would get incredibly angry and couldn't explain why. She felt like her life, everything she was - _herself_ - was slipping through her fingers like sand. No matter how hard she tried to hold on, it disappeared, bit by bit. She was a shell, left hollow inside by the memories that never were, that couldn't have been, that didn't _fit_, and yet were gone just the same. Soon enough, there would be nothing left, just a Donna-shaped hole where she had once been. She was fading and she didn't know how to stop it.

Then, one day, something captured her attention.

Spreading cream cheese over a bagel one morning, she barely noticed when her mother clicked on the tiny television tucked into one corner of the kitchen counter. The drone of the local news anchor washed over her as she ate breakfast, thinking about nothing in particular and not particularly looking forward to her day at work. Looking back on that moment later, she couldn't recall what it had been that had first drew her in to the news report. One second she had been staring blankly out the window, the next she was riveted to the screen by the breaking story of the downfall of a corporation that involved political conspiracy, illegal aliens, and biological weapons. A major conglomerate had used its connections to mask both its use of cheap, illegal labor and its production of lethal, illegal biological compounds, all while turning a tidy arms-dealing profit under the cover of its more legitimate vehicle manufacturing roots. The fallout of the situation stretched from the military dictator of a small African country all the way to the Prime Minister's cabinet.

The story was all over the news and Donna couldn't stop watching. Though the media coverage offered much in the way of fodder, she couldn't help but think that something wasn't quite right about the story. Something in her whispered that what the media was telling was only half the tale. Unable to still the voice - and much more curious than she could remember being in a very long time - she did a little background study of her own. There were too many loose ends that couldn't be tied, from where the workers had vanished to after the sting to what, exactly, had been the base of the biological weapons the conglomerate had been so keen to make. Even the "solid" pieces of the story - like the African dictator's involvement - didn't add up under close scrutiny. Few people seemed to notice or care and those who did had little to show in the way of explanations for the discrepancies, for the holes.

Though Donna didn't find answers, either, she did find something better. Once again, she had an interest in something. She immersed herself in the news, more for the things that weren't said than those that were. Corporate scandals, bank intrigue, and government cover-ups fascinated her. She devoured the newspaper each morning and caught the broadcast every night, and took to researching anything that felt less than truthful. She learned more about corruption and crime than she ever thought she'd knew beyond getting arrested herself that one time in Chelsea. Even more, she started to put two and two together and come up with four where others didn't even see numbers. Curiosity piqued, Donna found herself drawn to the mysteries that weren't yet, the ones no one had noticed, the random happenings no one thought were important. Figuring things out gave her a feeling of purpose she hadn't had in a long time and helped her regain a sense of control over a life that more and more often felt like a lie.

One day a particular ad in the temp listings caught her eye. She recognized the business as one she'd researched a few weeks before. Some of their dealings had a shady and distinctly suspicious cast to them, but their records were airtight and tamper-proof. And they were looking for a secretary.

She volunteered immediately.

It hit her one night while she was "working late", picking the lock to the CEO's outer office. Between answering phones, taking dictation, and sneaking peeks at personnel files, Donna had found a kind of happiness - not perfect happiness, but closer than she'd been in ages. She had a purpose, a passion, and she felt that she was slowly finding her way back to whatever it was she lost, and maybe even _why_ she'd lost it in the first place.

She was getting closer, step by step, even if each step was in darkness.

She was used to that niggling itch in the back of her mind, the one that reminded her that she'd left the teakettle on or that she'd forgotten her mother's birthday or that she was missing half of her memories.

Maybe one day she'd get them all back.


End file.
